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Ontario policy to get kids thinking about careers at younger age draws praise

Post-secondary students who change their field of study can cost the system and themselves a lot in money and time. A new Ontario education policy is aimed at guiding students to plan for their careers much earlier, starting in kindergarten.

Parents and elementary and high schools should instead spend more time talking to kids about what they’re good at and interested in, an expert says.

Part of the conversation should address the bias parents and politicians have for a university education, said Ken Coates, ­co-author of Campus Confidential: 100 Start­ling Things You Don’t Know About Canadian Universities.

“We’ve got these very general social forces that say working with your hands and working outdoors is a bad thing. You should want to work in an office and have a white-collar job.”

Coates hopes a new Ontario government policy to get students thinking about careers well before they finish high school will change their futures.

In the Thames Valley District school board, that early career planning will start in the fall in classrooms from kindergarten to Grade 12 when a new career planning policy is rolled out.

A pilot project at Medway high school is part of the plan. Using a web-based application, students will explore career choices and then work backward to build a timetable of which courses they’ll have to take to pursue that career.

Students will see all the options available to them: apprenticeships and college and university programs that fit with that career.

Instead of finding out what students are capable of, some career planning exercises tell them they can be anything they want, which isn’t realistic, said Coates, Canada research chair in regional innovation at the Johnson-­Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Saskatchewan.

“We have thousands of kids in university who shouldn’t be there, we have kids in community colleges who should be somewhere else, we have kids in apprenticeships who should be somewhere else, we have kids who aren’t going to school that should be somewhere,” he said.

Though for many the default is university, that’s not the right move for most, said Coates.

There should be less emphasis on the idea that good jobs require university degrees because “that’s not true,” he said.

Students should be exposed to a range of post-secondary opportunities: colleges, apprenticeships, polytechnics and universities. University is a privilege that should be reserved for those who have the ability and motivation, Coates said.

“If you stop accepting people who don’t have the ability, the motivation or the curiosity to succeed, you’ll actually have more money to spend on those who really want to be there and you’ll get better results as a consequence.”

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THE BIG SWITCH

At Western University, undergraduate students last year changed their focus 6,774 times — about 2,500 of those were significant, said Glen Tigert, associate registrar at the university.

At some universities that would mean students would need to repeat a year, but that’s not the case at Western. The university changed how it structures its programs to give students more flexibility, Tigert said.

“We really want to provide more opportunities for our students to explore different disciplines and have some flexibility in degree programs.”

Students arrive at Western with an idea of what they’re interested in, but they may change their minds when they’re exposed to the wide variety of options at the university level, Tigert said.

ABOUT THE POLICY

Provincewide career/life planning policy that will roll out in Ontario schools this fall

Includes Ontario students from kindergarten to Grade 12 to help ready them for careers

Province provides a framework and each school board can implement it differently

Career planning is focused on four questions: Who am I? What are my opportunities? Who do I want to become? What is my plan for achieving my goals?

Focus is on three key goals: Ensuring students make informed career and education choices; give them learning opportunities about careers inside and outside the classroom; engage parents to be part of the planning.

When they begin university they have some impressions of what they like and what they’re interested in, but there’s so much more variety at a university-level that there may be options that they never ­considered before.